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Diagnostic for portable harddisk

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imtrobin:
Hi

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good way to diagnose whether a portable harddrive via USB is failing soon or not. Something like the harddisk manufacturers tool (eg. Western Digital LifeGuard tool) to detect the disk status. Most of them I found can't read USB portable harddisk, the closest one is HD Tune.

patthecat:
I use HD Tune or PassMark's DiskCheckup for monitoring internal drives from time to time.  However for your question on external drives, I think it depends whether or not the external USB drive controller supports SMART reporting as mentioned in this threads:

http://www.passmark.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1007
http://www.hddlife.com/eng/help/5_Troubleshooting/5_FAQ.htm

Western Digital Passport and IO drives seem to support SMART reporting as mentioned in this commercial product:
http://ariolic.com/activesmart/usb-smart.html

icekin:
Is it a real hard disk that is enclosed in a external case? If so, get an enclosure that supports eSATA and you can monitor it like an internal drive. I don't have an eSATA enclosure and use HDTune as well.

imtrobin:
I see. My enclosure don't support eSata. Darn. Thanks!

f0dder:
You can always take the disk out of the enclosure and mount it directly on your pata/sata, but of course that does take some work...

In my experience, S.M.A.R.T has never really said anything about reliability before it was obvious in other ways - ie., disk making clicking noises. But okay, you can miss those clicking noises in a noisy environment, and checking the "reallocated sectors count" with SMART would tell you.

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